England: silver sixpence of Elizabeth I, 1575, Tower mint, eglantine mintmark

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Nice coin. Thanks for sharing. The portrait is pleasing to me. I'm lucky enough to have an Elizabeth I crown, but the portrait is quite worn. I'm still looking for a nice Elizabeth portrait on any denomination.

 

Nice coin, with good details.

 

My Elizabeth sixpence is not in as good shape as lordmarcovan's:


England Silver Sixpence 1561 Elizabeth I

Obverse: Crowned bust of Elizabeth facing left with a rose behind her head
Text: ELIZABETH D G ANG FR ET HI REGINA
(Elizabeth by the Grace of God, England, France and Ireland, Queen)
Reverse: Shield with arms (lions and fleurs-de-lis) and long cross
Text: POSVI DEV ADIVTOREM MEV (I have made God my Helper)
Tower Mint mintmark, a downward arrow on obverse at top right
Size: 27 mm, weight: 2.75 gm

I bought my coin as one Elizabeth sixpence has a very peculiar connection to California as the English sea captain Francis Drake supposedly left one in Northern California during his 1579 stop there.

http://www.cointalk.com/threads/olo...a-sir-francis-drake-elizabeth-sixpence.279087

 

That is a very attractive example for the grade. I have a couple of these coins. The biggest problem I have seen in them has been die sinking which causes the fields to bulge and the portrait to lose a lot of detail.

This one is dated 1600, but it's also an overdate. I think that it is 1600 over 1590 which is quite a date gap for an overdate.



I spotted this raw one a couple of years later, which I like more.

 

It's so hard to get one with a vaguely acceptable portrait, so you've done well.

What I like about Elizabeth's coins are the strange denominations. There's a three halfpence (the only others being for William IV and Victoria, and those were for Ceylon), and this, the three farthings (S. 2571), used to give change for things that cost a farthing, so you didn't have to cut the penny up:



They didn't produce farthings because a silver coin would've been too small (the three farthings is only 13mm and 0.39g), and they didn't want to stoop so low as to mint copper coins. This policy also resulted in my lightest coin, the silver halfpenny (1582-4, 9mm, 0.24g, S. 2581):




That problem was remedied under the next monarch, James I (who'd issued copper in Scotland), when they let private companies do the dirty work.

 

The highest one I've given for your coins yet. Lovely piece of history!

 

The dies were made with a stock built up in advance. What you have there is a die originally with 159 as the date. Normally the last digit or last two digits were added when the die was actually used. In this instance the century changed, so it was necessary to change both second and third digits before adding the fourth. Although they would have avoided this extra work if possible, the amount of silver coming to the mint leading up to and at the turn of the century was much reduced, leaving anchor and cypher as the two scarcest marks.

There might be a trace of an anchor underneath the cypher on the reverse as the area around top of it has a slight disturbance, in which case the die was used during anchor (1598-1600) and then the anchor overstruck with a cypher following the pyx trial, in order to maximise the life of the die. The obverse certainly looks to be cypher over anchor.

 

Care to share?

 

As a collector, new to Great Britain’s coinage, I find it a solid 10! Eventually, I hope to move to older UK coinage. It is a beautiful example!

 

Yes Britain has an interesting and varied coinage. The phases are all very different - the Celts, Romans, Saxons, medieval hammered coins, modern hammered coins (like Elizabeth I, despite being nearly 500 years old), early milled coins, England-Scotland-Ireland-UK... and in all of them you can get good quality and historic coins for under $150 (although less so the Saxons!)

 

Excellent coin My Lord

Here's my own sixpence



Q

 

A groat or fourpence from 1582 based on the martlet MM. I purchased this for something like £5 or something years ago.